[Abstract:
The paper addresses the so-called “Crisis in the Humanities” in the context of
two of its most apparent symptoms: the digital transformation of our museums
and archives, and the explicitly parallel “Crisis in Tenure and Publishing”
that has more recently come to attention.It introduces and frames a practical proposal, now underway, for dealing
with both.This is the NINES initiative:
Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship.The rationale of NINES is described,
including the initial set of digital tools now in active development.The general aim of NINES is to move the
rethinking of literary and cultural studies, method as well as theory, by
establishing an institutionalized mechanism (peer-reviewed) for new kinds of
digital-based analytic and interpretive practices.]

Late in the 19th century
Matthew Arnold looked to France
as a model for a salutary “Influence of Academies” on culture in general.25 years ago Arnold’s academic inheritors appeared to be
living the realization of his hope.But
then came the crash.Humanities
scholarship and education has been a holy mess for some time.Looking at the way we live now in the academy,
one can hardly not recall Trollope’s dark portrayal ofThe Way We Live Now.What’s going on?Where are the snows of yesteryear?

Something
like those very questions drove the editor of Critical Inquiry, W. J. T. Mitchell, to summon the journal’s board
of editors to a symposium in April 2003 “to discuss the future of the journal
and of the interdisciplinary fields of criticism and theory” (324).Some of the most distinguished North American
academics gathered in Chicago
to assess “The Future of Criticism”, and in particular of Critical Theory.I missed the Friday night public forum and
pep-rally for the symposium but made it for the key event, the day-long
Saturday discussions.From these I
departed for home shocked and more than a little dismayed by what I
learned.

Most of us registered, one way or
another, the malaise that has grown widespread in the humanities in America, and I
wasn’t particularly disheartened that we were all uncertain about how best to
deal with the problems we talked about.Something else was troubling, however: the degree of ignorance about
information technology and its critical relevance to humanities education and
scholarship.I’ve spent almost twenty
years studying this subject in the only way that gives a chance of doing
something useful aboutit.That is, by hands-on collaborative
interdisciplinary work.By designing and
building the tools and systems that alone will teach one what these tools are
and what they might be, what they mean and what they might mean.You don’t learn a language by talking about
it or reading books.You learn it by
speaking it and writing it.There’s no
other way.Anything less is just, well,
theoretical.

So far as information technology concerns
traditional humanities, the issues are more clearly understood in the United Kingdom and Europe than they are in the United States.Moreover, if you want to engage serious,
practical conversation about humanities education and digital culture, America’s most
distinguished humanities research institutions – with few exceptions -- are not
the places to go.You will want to visit
and talk instead with scholars and educators in the colleges and in
universities whose libraries are primarily organized to meet the pedagogical
needs of the faculty.

The CI meeting explained why.We’re illiterate.Besides myself, no one on the CI board can
use any of the languages we need to understand how to operate with our
proliferating digital technologies– not even elementary markup languages.Most had never heard of TEI and no one I
talked with was aware of the impact it was already exerting on humanities
scholarship and education.The library,
especially the research library, is a cornerstone if not the very foundation of
modern humanities.It is undergoing
right now a complete digital transformation.In the coming decades – the process has already begun -- the entirety of
our cultural inheritance will be transformed and re-edited in digital forms.Do we understand what that means, what
problems it brings, how they might be addressed?Theoretical as well as very practical
discussions about these matters have been going on for years and decisions are
taken every day.Yet digital illiteracy
puts many of us on the margin of conversations and actions that affect the
center of our cultural interests (as citizens) and our professional interests
(as scholars and educators).

This situation has to change, and in
the last part of this talk I will briefly describe a project called NINES that
would if successful help the change along.The project is practical in two ways: it addresses some of the most
basic needs and self-interests of the working scholar; it circumscribes its
work to a specific interdisciplinary region which scholars can, if they choose,
direct and control.

What seems to me impractical is to
continue framing the crisis in humanities scholarship in the theological terms
of “critical theory” and “cultural studies”.Remember that distinction between the base and the superstructure?Remember it. Our ideological conflicts today are deeply
imbedded – commercially, economically, institutionally.Fifteen years ago few registered the social
and cultural emergency that now grows more and more apparent.E. P. Thompson’s 1978The
Poverty of Theory, a prescient work, was scarcely engaged.Thompson seemed one of those truculent
British Marxists, good in the trenches, like his revered William Morris, but
not equipped to handle the spectacular illusions of Late Capitalism.

Non
sumus quales eramus.But if we are all now sadder men and women,
are we any wiser?It’s a nice
question.From the perspective of the CI
participants, the symposium was a gathering of troubled eagles; to the
reporters from New York and Boston who covered the meeting, it recalled nothing
so much as Chaucer’s Parliament of Foules.Certainly the intramural scene has changed.The Winter 2004 issue of CI collects the
thirty “statements for the conference” (324) that we participants were asked to
make in order to set up the symposium’s discussions.The commentaries are all searching, serious,
often self-critical.But are they
self-critical in any meaningful, practical sense?

Judge for yourselves by considering for a
moment the way the issue opens: with a lecture Bruno Latour gave at the StanfordHumanitiesResearchCenter the week before
the April meeting of the CI board of editors.The lecture is a severe critique of critique from what D. G. Rossetti
called “an inner standing-point” -- that most telling of critical positions.

Let’s look more closely at this brilliant
essay.Latour summons for review the
“dismal” state (“dismal” is his word: p.241) into which “critical theory”, including his own work, has
fallen.It is a splendid display – a
Houyhnhnm addressing the horses of instruction – and carried off with superb
grace and vigor.“A certain form of
critical spirit has sent us down the wrong path”, Latour declares, adding that
“If [the critical mind] is to renew itself and be relevant again [it must
cultivate] a stubbornly realist attitude [that deals with] what I will call
matters of concern, not matters of fact” (231).Latour then proceeds to tease out this distinction by way of an elegant
tour of critical philosophy, from which emerges a new hero of our own time –
Alfred North Whitehead.

Latour celebrates Whitehead for
exposing the symbiotic relation between “matters of fact” on one hand and
“cultural critique” on the other.In
each case we are delivered over to what Latour describes as

“a
poor proxy of experience and of experimentation, and, I would add, a confusing
bundle of polemics, of epistemology, of modernist politics that can in no way
claim to represent what is requested by a realist attitude.” (245)

I won’t spoil Latour’s paper with a
clumsy précis of my own.In this plea
for “experience and experimentation”, however, one passage particularly caught
my attention.Latour is trying to tell
us how to secure our new saving grace, how “To retrieve a realist attitude”:

To
retrieve a realist attitude, it is not enough to dismantle critical weapons so
uncritically built up by our predecessors as we would obsolete but still
dangerous atomic silos.If we had to
dismantle social theory only, it would be a rather simple affair; like the
Soviet Empire, those big totalities have feet of clay.But the difficulty lies in the fact that they
are built on top of a much older philosophy, so that whenever we try to replace
matters of fact by matters of concern, we seem to lose something along the
way.It is like trying to fill the
mythical Danaid’s barrel—no matter what we put in it, the level of realism
never increases.As long as we have not
sealed the leaks, the realist attitude will always be split [sic]; matters of
fact take the best part, and matters of concern are limited to a rich but
essentially void or irrelevant history. (243)

But
big totalities often exhibit enormous staying power: the Roman Church and
Christianity are pretty impressive as totalities go.Or look at the American Imperium.It has its feet of clay pretty well firmly on
the ground, and the British Empire itself is
scarcely an obsolete power.We could all
cite numerous examples.Even when these
totalities seem as perished and gone as Shelley’s Ozymandias, they find ways to
survive in their death-states, like Pynchon’s Thanatoids.Shelley’s more skeptical friend Byron had a
clear if mordant view of these creatures he called the “dead but sceptred
sovereigns who still rule/ Our spirits from their urns “ (ManfredIII.4. 40-41).

Latour’s argument, like his prose, seems
to have lost something along the way.Surely this jumble of mixed metaphors is but a “poor proxy of experience
and experimentation”, “a confusing bundle of polemics, of epistemology, of
modernist politics that can in no way claim to represent what is requested by a
realist attitude”. Reading this passage we recall – I recall, anyhow – Lenin,
and I wonder:But what is to be
done?“Experience and experimentation”
signal at courses of action.And then I
think of Goethe: “Am Anfang war die Tat”.And finally, of course, Marx: “The philosophers have only thought to
interpret the world.The point is to
change it.”

Marx and especially Lenin focus on the
practical social actions that bring about real world revolution.They think about how to change the big
totalities.But we all live in many
worlds, most of them more circumscribed than the ones Marx and Lenin had in
view.As that old Beatles song sweetly
argued, “You don’t have to change the world” to make a difference that makes a
difference.Ways of thinking about
social action, about wanting “to make a revolution”, might be usefully scaled
down and re-applied.We don’t need to
know everything before doing something.There’s a time for every purpose under heaven.Sometimes thinking about big totalities is
helpful, sometimes it isn’t.Helpful
for thinking, helpful for social action.

Texts like Latour’s, like this one of
mine, are forms of social action operating at the level of the
superstructure.They are polemical moves
looking to bring about change in the operating system of an ideological
apparatus – the academy.But can
Latour’s call for “experience and experimentation” be realized – I mean
realized beyond the academy’s shop talk, so ludicrous or irrelevant to the
nonunionized world around us?I don’t
think so.Latour’s call is abstract, a
rhetorical gesture.We hear it and we
ask ourselves what Eliot Ness asked in The
Untouchables?“But what are you
prepared to do?”

The call for the scholar to undertake a
citizen’s active life is imperative, certainly at this time.It is a call we sometimes fail to hear, and
often for good reason.For we know that
scholarship and science cannot thrive outside a monastery, a library, a
laboratory, an ivory tower – even a think-tank!But those places and we who use them must be socially secured.Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott “ is a
cautionary tale for every intellectual.Ladies and gentlemen, we cannot live in art or ideas, we must dispraise
those fugitive and cloistered virtues that we must also, of course,
cultivate.The life of the mind is no
life at all unless lived by a citizen in the world.

I won’t presume to say anything more on
that subject.“Each to himself must be
the oracle” about how we fulfill our direct citizen’s obligations.The state of our public life today is
certainly shameful and dangerous.We in
the United States
have elected a government whose president brazenly tells us that he listens for
the infallible voice of a God, rather than to the fallible voices of thoughtful
men and women, when he wants guidance in executing grave public decisions.In face of this situation, all of us have
clear civic duties.

That great threat to the public good should not distract us, however,
from the intramural and academic crisis in which we find ourselves.If the problems of our tight little island
seem less important than our country’s problems, they are certainly no less
pressing.We have obligations as we are
scholars, obligations that society expects us to meet because of our special
educator’s vocation.What is to be done
here, in the academy?

A small beginning might come if we
stopped the cant that pervades so much of our discourse.The media have no trouble satirizing
intellectuals who appear to see all things through the narrow chinks of our
academic cavern.An especially dismal
aspect of our professional writing today is itsineffectual angelism, our jargon of moral,
social, and political action.It is
widespread.But to be “transgressive” in
a Routledge book or a Critical Inquiry
essay—that word “transgressive” has grown legions -- is surely not something
devoutly to be wished.Jargons of
impiety and critique – our current rhetorics of displacement – define the
treason of the intellectuals, the signs of a transgression that has no
referent, not even an intramural one.The worst of such writing, for the humanities scholar anyhow, is its
abuse of the language we have sworn to preserve and protect.

To begin with such a practical
self-criticism would make a real difference in the way we execute our
scholarship.It would help to overthrow
the “cant political, cant moral, and cant poetical” – as Byron called it in his
day – that pervades our intramural publications.

But scholars, especially humanities
scholars, face another set of problems and obligations – perhaps even more
serious, certainly much less tractable.To expose them clearly I shall revisit the crisis in the humanities from
a slightly different perspective.Next
to Critical Inquiry’s apprehensions
about the state of Critical Theory let us set Stephen Greenblatt’s pragmatic
worry about “The Crisis in Tenure and Publishing”.Let us set our inner standing-point at the
level of the base this time, not the superstructure.

We’ll begin with a fact of great concern
to scholars:most university presses are
running at increasingly sharp deficits.Given the current model of academic publishing, this trend will not be
reversed, as everyone inside the university publishing network knows.We scholars are producing larger and larger
amounts of scholarship and passing it to a delivery system with diminishing
capacities to sustain its publication.As an editor of a monograph series, the Virginia Victorian Studies, I
have seen how this pressure alters what a university press is prepared to
undertake.The notorious stigma that has
grown up recently against “single-author studies” is only one sign of the
difficulty.

But that is to speak only of book
publication.We should be aware that a
parallel problem, every bit as acute, exists for periodical publication, where
a similar dysfunction can be observed.In each of these cases the university library has become almost the only
reliable purchaser of scholarly books and periodicals; and every year, as we
know, library funds for such materials get cut further

Many also realize that online
scholarly publication is the natural and inevitable response to this general
problem of scholarly and educational communication.How to bring about the transition to online
publication is the $64,000 question.And
it’s not the technology that makes the problem so difficult, as the examples of
online journal publication, JSTORE (http://www.jstor.org/)
and Project Muse (http://muse.jhu.edu/), demonstrate.The Jordan will not be crossed until
scholars and educators are prepared not simply to search and access archived
materials online – which is increasingly done --, but to publish and to
peer-review online – to carry out the major part of our productive educational
work in digital forms.The institutional resistance
to such a major change in scholarly work behaviors is widespread, deep, and
entirely understandable.It is not in
the short-term (immediate) interest of scholars or their institutions to make a
transition to digital work.The upfront
costs are high, the learning curve is steep.Most telling of all, the design of the in-place paper-based system has
the sophistication and clear strengths that come from hundreds of years of
practical use.With rare exceptions,
established scholars have the least practical involvement with information
technology.This too is
understandable.The known scholar can
still, usually, get his or her work published in the usual paper-based ways
precisely because they are known, if diminished, quantities.

The consequences of this situation are
apparent.For traditional paper-based
work, it is “the Crisis in Humanities”.For digital humanities, it is another form of that crisis.Digital scholarship – even the best of it --
is all more or less atomized, growing like so many Topsies.Worse, these creatures are idiosyncratically
designed and so can’t easily talk to each other.They also typically get born into poverty --
even the best-funded ones.Ensuring
their maintenance, development, and survival is a daunting challenge.Worst of all, the work regularly passes
without much practical institutional notice.Accepted professional standards do not control the work in objective
ways.Most of it comes into being without
oversight or peer-review.

“What is to be done?”Lenin’s famous question is very much to the
point here, for our scholarship is facing a future that is at once certain and
uncertain.It is going to be cast and
maintained and disseminated in digital forms.We may not now approve of this but it is nonetheless inevitable.We may not now know how to do this but we
will learn.Because we have no
choice.

II

Which brings me at last to my main
subject, NINES (or 9S: Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century
Electronic Scholarship).It is a
three-year undertaking initiated by myself and a group of scholars to establish
an online environment for publishing peer-reviewed research in
nineteenth-century British and American studies.Although the resource will have significant
pedagogical and classroom components, it is primarily an institutional
mechanism for digitally-organized research and scholarship.

NINES is conceived partly as an
professional facilitator and partly as an advocacy group to protect the
interests of scholars and educators.It
is, as they say, results-oriented.It will liaison with interested publishing venues on behalf
and in the interests of scholars and educators and the work we produce.A coordinated group of editorial boards oversees
the work, which will include various kinds of content: traditional texts and
documents—editions, critical works of all kinds—as well as
"born-digital" studies that relate to all aspects of
nineteenth-century culture. NINES is a model and working example for
scholarship that takes advantage of digital resources and internet
connectivity. It provides scholars with access to a uniformly coded textual
environment and a suite of computerized analytic and interpretive tools.A key goal of NINES is to expose the rich
hermeneutic potential of the electronic medium – beyond the dazzle of digital
imaging and the early breakthrough of hypertext.

Most important, NINES is not
just a committee of concerned educators who mean to discuss the problems and
opportunities presented by digital technology.NINES is a practical undertaking and it is already underway.Here is its three year initial plan:

To establish the editorial
mechanisms for soliciting, peer-reviewing, aggregating, and finally publishing
born-digital scholarship and criticism in nineteenth-century British and
American studies.The effort
necessarily involves re-examining how traditional scholarly standards and best
practices can be migrated and adapted to a digital environment.

To begin modeling a technical and
institutional framework that integrates our inherited archive of paper-based
materials – primary as well as secondary – withemerging forms of digital scholarship and criticism.

To develop a suite of
user-friendly procedures and easily-accessible digital tools and that will help
scholars and students produce interesting work in digital form.Digital technology offers remarkable new
possibilities for studying, analyzing, and interpreting our cultural inheritance
in ways – both individual and collaborative – that have not been possible
previously.

To run a series of summer
fellowships for scholars who are working on digital projects in
nineteenth-century studies.Successful
fellowship applicants will be fully funded for an extended workshop where they
can develop their projects in the company of other scholars doing similar
projects and in a high-caliber technical support environment.

That is the general administrative
design model of NINES.Under its
auspices we are developing software conceived specifically for scholars and
educators working in the humanities, and in particular in literary and cultural
studies.These tools will be ready for
use in 2005 and they include the following:

1.
An XML editor for generating traditional textual materials – editions as well
as any form of critical or interpretive commentary -- to a uniform markup
standard.This editor is being designed
so that it can be as easy to use as traditional text editors like WordPerfect
or Word.

2.
A markup schema designed specifically for literary and cultural studies
materials.This schema will wrap a given
electronic document and supply it with a basic set of metadata for integrating
the document into the electronic environment of which it is a part and
connecting it to larger related environments.

Beyond those basic instruments, we
are building digital tools that can execute critical and interpretive
operations of a much more complex order.These tools facilitate actions that humanists already perform in paper-based
environments.But they use the special
capacities of computerized systems to augment our traditional interpretive
activities.

3.
A text comparison tool called JUXTA for comparing and collating textual
similarities and differences in a given set of equivalent documents.Since the critical re-editing of our
inherited corpus will necessarily occupy a central focus of coming humanities
scholarship, a tool of this kind is fundamental.

4.An online collaborative playspace called
IVANHOE for organizing interpretiveinvestigations of traditional humanities materials of any kind.Applicable for either classroom or research
use, IVANHOE’s design has a double (dialectical) function: to promote the
critical investigation of textual and graphical works, and to expose those
investigations themselves to critical reflection and study.

5.COLLEX.In collaboration with a project to redesign The Rossetti Archive, NINES is developing a data model and set of
tools called COLLEX that allows users of digital resources to assemble and
share virtual "collections" and to present annotated
"exhibits" and re-arrangements of online materials.These critical rearrangements can of course
bring together materials that are variously diverse – materially, formally,
historically.COLLEX is an interface for
exploring complex bodies of diverse cultural materials in order to expose new
networks of relations.

The first Rossetti rearrangements will be
undertaken by the Archive's general editor and by a few invited literary
scholars and art historians, who will act as guest critics and curators,
offering radically different perspectives on the Rossettis, Swinburne, Morris
and their circle, all based on the same corpus of digital files. Later,
individual users will be able to assemble and comment on Archive materials in
private collection spaces, choose whether to make those assemblages available
to others, and then build and share annotated exhibits based on their own
virtual collections or on existing, user-created work.

This toolset aims to reveal the
interpretive possibilities embedded in any digital archive by making the
manipulation and annotation of archived resources open to all users. This
set of interface tools is now being designed by using my Rossetti Archive as
the work’s development testbed.Once the
design is successfully implemented there it will be included in the suite of
NINES authoring tools.

6.The ‘Patacritical Demon.This is a tool for tracking and visualizing
acts of critical reflection and interpretation as they are being applied in
real-time to specific works, and in particular to imaginative works like poems
or stories.It is a device for
addressing the following problem: How does one formalize “exceptional” and
highly subjective activities like acts of interpretation and at the same time
preserve their subjective status.The
Demon derives its name, incidentally, from Alfred Jarry’s proposal for a
science that he called ‘Pataphysics, that is, “a science of exceptions” (or
“the science of imaginary solutions”).1

Like IVANHOE and JUXTA, The ‘Patacritical
Demon outputs XML coded data.Consequently, the work done with all three of these interpretive tools
can be integrated with the rest of the NINES-environment materials.

Oh yes, one other thing. Whatever happens
with NINES – whether that institutional event takes hold or not – these
critical tools will be built.They will
also be freely distributed to anyone who wants them.

Conclusion

I’m a book scholar, about as traditional
as you get.My work, including my
theoretical work, is historicist and even philological and my orientation is
decidedly humanist.“Glory to man in the
highest, for man is the master of things.”That witty and impish line from Swinburne is very much to my taste.Men (and women) are indeed called to the
mastery of things.Of things
precisely.Of people and of life events
we are and always will be participants and students, never masters.Drawing that distinction is what it means to
be – as Swinburne was -- a humanist.

Today some new things have to be
mastered.In addition -- and to recall
Latour – we have to be concerned about these new things, about how we make them
and what we use them for.We will do
this by becoming students again – a role that, as educators and humanists, I
think we’re especially good at.For some
of us, this will be a road not taken.Fair enough. But whether we choose to or not, we should all be clear
about the slow train that’s coming and that won’t be sidetracked.“The Publishing and Tenure Crisis” is one
certain sign of what’s happening.So is
the digital transformation of our research archives, the seat of our cultural
memory.

NINES is a proposal to engage with these
problems in specific and practical ways.It takes a relatively short rather than a long view – because in matters
of concern to us, we are always humanists, even in the short run.We know that our longest views, our
totalizing conceptions, are finally only heuristic and hypothetical.But that humanist understanding is exactly
why, as Shelley observed,we cannot “let
I dare not wait upon I would”.We have
to get going now, we can’t wait to see if there’s more to learn.Of course there’s more to learn, that’s why
we must fare forth.How else will we
learn what we need to know.We have to
set the stage for our failures if we’re to have any chance of measuring
success.We will, as the poet observed,
“learn by going where we have to go”.

One last point is worth our
reflection.Capitalist entrepreneurs are
already actively trying to gain control over as much information as they
can.Perhaps never before has knowledge
been so clearly perceived as a fungible thing, as a commodity to be bought and
sold.Humanities scholarship has a
calculable market price, and the market will work to buy low and sell high, as
the dreadful examples of Elsevier and Kluwer have recently revealed to the
science community.2

And don’t imagine that our cultural
heritage – what Shelley called our poetry is safe from commercial exploitation
by agents that view our work – what they call “the content” we create – as a
marketable commodity.Perhaps the chief
virtue of a project like NINES is to supply scholars with a social mechanism
for preserving and protecting what we do.

I don’t know if we will be successful in
our primary objective: leveraging NINES to assemble and publish an initial body
of peer-reviewed online scholarship and criticismthat can initiate an ongoing venue for such
work,Several models are imaginable that
would uselibraries or traditional
scholarly presses as the publishing vehicles, or some combination of the
two.Whether or not the agents needed to
make any of these models work will decide to do so is unclear.The agents – that’s to say, ourselves.The matter won’t become clear, one way or the
other, until we undertake to design and implement amodel.NINES can only exist in practice, not in theory.

2 The charges
levied by this pair of traditional publishers of scientific journals grew so
outrageous that a serious reaction has set in, and scientists are now
developing their own online publishing venues: see Biomed Central, the Public
Library of Science, and HighWire.NINES
has taken some of its inspiration from these ventures.But scientists and humanists have very
different requirements with respect to the inherited cultural archive.The preservation and transmission of that
archive – ideally, the entirety of that archive -- is perhaps the central
mission of the humanist.The case is far
different for the scientist qua
scientist.